Here is what I did: I have two linux boxes. the first box had many
hardrives in it, but needed to be used in other ways. So I took 4
harddrives out of it and placed it in the other Linux box. I thought it
would be able to read these right away. (maybe this was my mistake?) I
could mount all of the drives in there. three of my drives had all
their data remain intact, but the fourth one did not. all that remained
on the 4th drive was the lost+found directory.

I'm sure the data is still there, it's just eluding me. sadly I don't
know how to find it. Thought I found dump2fs which tells me that it
needs recovery. don't know how much help this will give: